“More masculine!” Miss Frost repeated. “Well, I suppose there’s Fielding,” she added.
“Oh, yes!” Richard cried. “Do you mean Tom Jones?”
“I do,” Miss Frost replied, with a sigh. “If one can count sexual escapades as one result of crushes—”
“Why not?” Richard Abbott quickly said.
“You’re how old?” Miss Frost asked me. Once again, her long fingers touched my shoulder. I recalled how Aunt Muriel had fainted (twice), and briefly feared I would soon lose consciousness.
“I’m thirteen,” I told her.
“Three novels are enough of a beginning at thirteen,” she said to Richard. “It wouldn’t be wise to overload him with crushes at too young an age. Let’s just see where these three novels lead him, shall we?” Once more Miss Frost smiled at me. “Begin with the Fielding,” she advised me. “It’s arguably the most primitive. You’ll find that the Brontë sisters are more emotional—more psychological. They’re more grown-up novelists.”
“Miss Frost?” Richard Abbott said. “Have you ever been onstage—have you ever acted?”
“Only in my mind,” she answered him, almost flirtatiously. “When I was younger—all the time.”
Richard gave me a conspiratorial look; I knew perfectly well what the talented young newcomer to the First Sister Players was thinking. A tower of sexual strength stood before us; to Richard and me, Miss Frost was a woman with an untamable freedom—a certain lawlessness definitely accompanied her.
To a younger man, Richard Abbott, and to me—I was a thirteen-year-old daydreamer who suddenly desired to write the story of my crushes on the wrong people and to have sex with a librarian in her thirties—Miss Frost was an unquestionable sexual presence.
“There’s a part for you, Miss Frost,” Richard Abbott ventured, while we followed her through the stacks, where she was gathering my first three literary novels.
“Actually, one of two possible parts,” I pointed out.
“Yes, you have to choose,” Richard quickly added. “It’s either Hedda in Hedda Gabler, or Nora in A Doll’s House. Do you know Ibsen? These are often called problem plays—”
“That’s some choice,” Miss Frost said, smiling at me. “Either I get to shoot myself in the temple, or I get to be the kind of woman who abandons her three young children.”
“I think it’s a positive decision, in both cases,” Richard Abbott tried to reassure her.
“Oh, how very positive!” Miss Frost said, laughing—with a wave of her long-fingered hand. (When she laughed, there was something hoarse and low in her voice, which almost immediately jumped to a higher, clearer register.)
“Nils Borkman is the director,” I warned Miss Frost; I was feeling protective of her already, and we’d only just met.
“My dear boy,” Miss Frost said to me, “as if there’s a soul in First Sister who doesn’t know that a neuroses-ridden Norwegian—no neophyte to ‘serious drama’—is our little theater’s director.”
She said suddenly to Richard: “I would be interested to know—if A Doll’s House is the Ibsen that we choose, and I am to be the much-misunderstood Nora—how you will be cast, Mr. Richard Abbott.” Before Richard could answer her, Miss Frost went on: “My guess is that you would be Torvald Helmer, Nora’s dull and uncomprehending husband—he whose life Nora saves, but he can’t save hers.”
“I would guess that is how I will be cast,” Richard ventured cautiously. “Of course I’m not the director.”
“You must tell me, Richard Abbott, if you intend to flirt with me—I don’t mean in our onstage roles,” Miss Frost said.
“No—not at all!” Richard cried. “I’m seriously flirting with Bill’s mom.”
“Very well, then—that’s the right answer,” she told him—once more ruffling my hair, but she kept talking to Richard. “And if it’s Hedda Gabler that we do, and I’m Hedda—well, the decision regarding your role is a more complicated one, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Richard said thoughtfully. “I hope, in the case of Hedda Gabler, I am not the dull, uncomprehending husband—I would hate to be George,” Richard said.
“Who wouldn’t hate to be George?” Miss Frost asked him.
“There’s the writer Hedda destroys,” Richard speculated. “I don’t put it past Nils to cast me as Eilert Løvborg.”
“You would be wrong for the part!” Miss Frost declared.
“That leaves Judge Brack,” Richard Abbott surmised.
“That might be fun,” Miss Frost told him. “I shoot myself to escape your clutches.”
“I could well imagine being destroyed by that,” Richard Abbott said, most graciously. They were acting, even now—I could tell—and they were not amateurs. My mother wouldn’t need to be doing much prompting in their cases; I didn’t imagine that Richard Abbott or Miss Frost would ever forget a line or misspeak a single word.
“I shall think about it and get back to you,” Miss Frost told Richard. There was a tall, narrow, dimly lit mirror in the foyer of the library, where a long row of coat hooks revealed a solitary raincoat—probably Miss Frost’s. She glanced at her hair in the mirror. “I’ve been considering longer hair,” she said, as if to her double.
“I imagine Hedda with somewhat longer hair,” Richard said.
“Do you?” Miss Frost asked, but she was smiling at me again. “Just look at you, William,” she said suddenly. “Talk about ‘coming of age’—just look at this boy!” I must have blushed, or looked away—clutching those three coming-of-age novels to my heart.
MISS FROST CHOSE WELL. I would read Tom Jones, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre—in that order—thus becoming, to my mom’s surprise, a reader. And what those novels taught me was that adventure was not confined to seafaring, with or without pirates. One could find considerable excitement by not escaping to science fiction or futuristic fantasies; it wasn’t necessary to read a Western or a romance novel in order to transport oneself. In reading, as in writing, all one needed—that is, in order to have an utterly absorbing journey—was a believable but formidable relationship. What else, after all, did crushes—especially crushes on the wrong people—lead to?
“Well, Bill, let’s get you home so you can start reading,” Richard Abbott said that warm September evening, and—turning to Miss Frost, in the foyer of the library—he said (in a voice not his own) the last thing Judge Brack says to Hedda in act 4, “‘We shall get on capitally together, we two!’”
There would be two months of rehearsals for Hedda Gabler that fall, so I would become most familiar with that line—not to mention the last lines Hedda says, in response. She has already exited the stage, but—speaking offstage, loud and clear, as the stage directions say—Miss Frost (as Hedda) responds, “‘Yes, don’t you flatter yourself we will, Judge Brack? Now that you are the one cock in the basket—’” A shot is heard within, the stage directions then say.
Do I sincerely love that play, or did I adore it because Richard Abbott and Miss Frost brought it to life for me? Grandpa Harry was outstanding in a small role—that of George’s aunt Juliana, Miss Tesman—and my aunt Muriel was the needy comrade of Eilert Løvborg, Mrs. Elvsted.